About

Tania Allen is a Professor of Media Arts, Design and Technology and Design Studies at NC State University's College of Design. Her research and scholarship focus on critical cartography and critical mapping as tools for design research. Building on theories from anthropology, action research, placemaking, and participatory design, her work aims to 'thicken' data visualization by emphasizing the stories and experiences at the core of data collection, cleaning, manipulation, and communication. Central to her approach is the reciprocal activity of encoding and decoding, which bridges the etic perspective of the designer and the emic perspective of the user, using data to uncover and communicate truths while evaluating their meaning. She is the co-director of the design research group co-lab, which develops methodologies for critical mapping as a participatory design tool, challenging assumptions embedded within mapping and visualization processes. Allen authored 'Solving Critical Design Problems: Theory and Practice' (2018) and co-authored 'Beyond the Map: Unpacking Critical Cartography in the Digital Humanities' (2015). Her current work includes publications on Confederate Memorialization and urban development, and she co-directed the colloquium 'Oppressive Infrastructures: Examining Systems of (in)Equity In/Through/By Data.' Allen is a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Geospatial Analytics and has contributed to pedagogical initiatives emphasizing higher-order thinking skills through critical and creative pedagogy. Her professional practice includes developing branding and communication systems for clients such as the Chicago Botanic Garden, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Accenture, MIT, and Harvard University, with a focus on using design as a catalyst for community engagement and social change through participatory and co-creative processes. Her current work primarily involves data visualization and critical mapping to interrogate assumptions about proposed design actions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Physics
• Data science
• Management science

Selected publications

• Tranexamic acid versus placebo to prevent bleeding in patients with haematological malignancies and severe thrombocytopenia (TREATT): a randomised, double-blind, parallel, phase 3 superiority trial

  The Lancet Haematology · 2024-12-03 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Editorial: Language in design

  Proceedings of DRS · 2024-06-19

  articleOpen access

  The role of language is central to the practice of designing, though our understanding of this role has evolved from more formal-language representations to more natural-language representations. Language plays a central and critical role in all aspects of design including: collaboration, problem understanding and framing, modelling, decision-making, creativity, and marketing. With textual data relating to design widely available, and recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), we are poised at an interesting stage in our understanding of the role of language in designing. The last few years have seen what is being called a Cambrian Explosion in large language models (LLMs) that effectively represent human language and to all appearances, human knowledge and reasoning as well. Subsequent deployment of AI applications have thrown into sharp relief questions regarding the role of language in the exploration and representation of knowledge in general; questions that will have a large impact on how we go about designing. This theme track re-examines the role of language in designing, asking questions about how the latest developments in technology will change practices of language use in general and conversation in particular in design processes. We invite contributions that focus fundamentally and empirically on analysing language as a way to understand designing and design education in all forms, whether through ‘conventional’ conversation, or through AI-mediated conversation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Maps as Innovative Tools in Design Research

  2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Data science
  • Computer Science

  Sara Queen and Tania Allen discuss how they use maps in their work to "make the abstract concrete and to connect meanings and concepts." Maps can do a lot. They can measure place, isolate information to show relationships, show relative size or importance (i.e. scale), frame and orient our interpretation of data. represent visible or invisible phenomena visually, and tell stories. Maps are “constructs of reality,” When we are making them, we are “creating a view of reality that will impact how we understand the world.”

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Maps to Connect Time and Place

  2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Our surroundings include the natural world and also the built environment. Consider the idea that a basic need is to not only live in a healthy environment in terms of ecology and climate, but also in an environment that makes you feel psychologically and socially safe - free from threats, reminders of violence, and the stress that these unhealthy surroundings create. Sara Queen and Tania Allen use maps to examine and visualize patterns of confederate memorialization -Â an aspect of the built environment that can give rise to strong emotions. Through maps, they are able to view memorialization in the US in historical and current contexts.Â

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negotiating the page: Digital annotation and graphic literature

  Proceedings of DRS · 2022-06-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The past ten years have seen an increased acceptance and study of the graphic novel as a literary instrument. More and more authors and designers are using the comic book platform and its shorter, serialized structure, to tell stories about race, class, and gender. In tackling these more complex issues, creators are intentionally or unintentionally making environments where readers are engaging in methods of negotiated reading—discovering an affinity with aspects of the characters and stories, and actively creating a discourse with identity and positionality. Digital annotation and reading platforms offer a unique opportunity to teachers, designers, scholars, and readers to actively examine and enhance the ways this negotiated reading is experienced, but most privilege text-based literature over graphic literature, and few actively connect the texts to real-world, contemporary experiences or evidence. This paper describes an approach for augmenting graphic novels through visual and digital annotation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From the Observable to the Explorable: Investigating Creative Research in Design as a Means for Guiding Critical Action

  Dialectic · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology

  As design and design research continues to evolve to address increasingly systemic and complex problems, the language of what designers "do" similarly evolves along a spectrum from problemsolving to sense-making. 1 An opportunity also exists within this dialogue to consider new forms of hybrid research methods that complement and support design as an independent domain of knowledge. Creative research -commonly used in the fine arts and humanities to examine how a given individual's or group's use of original ideas or imagination guides the operation of specific methods and offers key insights for gathering a type of data that has wide-ranging advantages in design research. It also provides techniques and perspectives that designers might integrate and build upon as they interrogate various aspects of their decision-making processes -especially as they attempt to dismantle preconceptions and biases regarding findings. By critically assessing a series of case studies, this paper will explore the following questions:

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Design and usability

  2019-06-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Narrative design thinking

  2019-06-06 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Experiential and adaptive design thinking

  2019-06-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Visualizing the invisible

  2019-06-06 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brooke Chornyak

  Royal College of Art

  36 shared

• Sara Queen

  North Carolina State University

  2 shared

• Sara Queen

  North Carolina State University

  2 shared

• Sara Queen

  1 shared

• Marc Russo

  North Carolina State University

  1 shared

• Susan D. Carson

  North Carolina State University

  1 shared

• Senthil Chandrasegaran

  Delft University of Technology

  1 shared

• M. W. Sheafe

  1 shared

Education

• Master of Graphic Design, Graphic Design

  North Carolina State University

  2010

• Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, Visual Communication

  School of the Art Institute of Chicago

  1999

• Bachelor of Arts, History

  Washington University in St Louis

  1994